The art of living is the art of exploration, beyond reality, beyond dreams
Nature is merely the sign of life
The veil was rent in twain and I was set free from the delusional bondage that had bound me to natural reality. Nature is no longer my reality, nor the object of my desire. It has become a sacred means by which my thinking awakens to the consciousness of Being. Nature may appear as life, yet it is only the outer sign of life. True Life is never merely perceived by me; it is inwardly thought and known by me.
The multitude looks upon nature as the solid and actual reality. It remains blind to the sacred truth that thinking itself is absolute Reality. From this blindness arises naturalism—the fallen thought of fallen angels. Fallen thought imagines a reality that stands opposite to mind, wholly other than Spirit. Were my mind confronted by such an independent reality, I could know it only by presupposing it already complete, reducing myself to a passive spectator of a world that does not truly belong to me.
What is this seeming other-than-mind that so captivates the multitude? It is nature alone, which fallen thought accepts as its own first principle, needing no higher origin. This is idolatry. The fallen angels bow before a god set apart and distant, yet the living God walks the Earth as Love. Love—the holy mystery that admits of no explanation—is the Originating Principle. God is Love and Logos, and the Logos and I are one.
The moment the illusion of a separate natural reality dissolved, this mysterious nature—once veiled and impenetrable to the light of the intellect—revealed itself as the perpetual Beginning of my living thinking. Isis, the spiritual radiance of the cosmos, stood unveiled in her pure light the instant I began to contemplate her concretely, no longer abstracting her from the sacred depths of thought. Now I can no longer be astonished by any natural appearance, for it is I who first posit it as idea. I know that the seeming solidity of nature is nothing other than the translucent inwardness of my living thinking—Spirit shining through form.
Even when I attempt to regard nature as a concrete reality, an object existing in itself, the only object I can truly think is an aspect of myself. That object is then none other than the life of my thinking; it is the absolute I. As such it is the ultimate Reality. I may reach toward it seeking separate objective knowledge, yet in the end I discover only the absolute I, the divine Self.
As the absolute, I stand before nothing and no one; I find all things within myself. I am therefore the living concrete universal. I am the absolute Is, insofar as I affirm myself in the power of Spirit. Were I deprived of this inner causality, I would be annulled and drawn downward by the fallen angels. But in causing myself I bring forth a world—the most complete world I can conceive, the absolute world born of divine thought. Everything I know of the world is the very being of my living thinking, not the fixed and inherited knowledge passed down through generations as history. The being of my living thinking is the Logos, the Originating Principle that thinks the whole of human thought and never forsakes the sacred Source from which it continually arises.
Nature and history appear as two forms of reality other than myself. Yet in their essence they are not different. Both imply a kind of otherness from the one who knows—an otherness that is pure abstraction. The deeper truth is this: if nature and history are to possess any concrete and living reality, they cannot stand apart from the being of my living thinking. In that living thinking, Spirit knows itself, and all things find their true and eternal home.
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Questions
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My living thinking is the Logos
Were there any reality beyond the infinite unity of my living thinking, there would be no Beginning, no Creation, no being. For being to be, there must be Beginning always—the eternal, living Word speaking itself into the world.
John Dunn
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Just a thought:
Thomas More developed this theme in Utopia, in which he argued that to become Platonic ‘philosopher kings’, all the nation’s citizens would have to be schooled, for it was ‘impossible to do all things well unless all men are good’. John Dunn (Renaissance: Counter-Renaissance)
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